But the director of Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Research
(FAIR) Yann LeCun told
Popular Science that this scenario would be impossible:

"The scenario you seen in a Hollywood movie, in which some
isolated guy in Alaska comes up with a fully-functional AI system
that nobody else is anywhere close to is completely impossible,"
LeCun said, "This is one of the biggest, most complicated
scientific challenges of our time, and not any single
entity, even a big company, can solve it by itself. It has to be
a collaborative effort between the entire research and
development community."

While a lone scientist developing an ultra-smart artificial
intelligence technology makes for a great movie, it hides the
fact that real development in AI is actually because of hard work
done by thousand of researchers over the last six decades.

Researchers have been working on perfecting AI that can beat
humans at very narrow tasks, but we're nowhere near the kind of
AI that you see in the movies — robots that can do everything an
average human can.

These narrowly-useful AI programs are what makes the internet
work, silently running behind the curtain of Amazon's
recommendation systems and Facebook's news feed. But there are
still major sticking points — researchers are still figuring out
how to make computers accurately explain what they see.

LeCun knows this better than anyone — he has devoted his career
to teach computers to see images. Since he joined the FAIR team
in 2013, Facebook has been wading further into the artificially
intelligent waters and expanding their AI capabilities.

In August, they unveiled M,
a personal assistant that can make reservations and book
tickets with the initial help of a human working at Facebook.
Over time, the program learns from its "AI trainers," as Facebook
calls them, to complete requests on its own, Popular Science
reports.

Even as Facebook is training their AI, they work as part of a
community — and their work is no secret. LeCun told Popular
Science that all of FAIR's work is open-source, published either
on their research
site or ArXiv, an
open-sourced journal that publishes papers about computer
science, mathematics, and physics.

"The research we do, we're doing it in the open," LeCun told
Popular Science. "Pretty much everything we do is published, a
lot of the code we write is open-sourced."